Dear Mr. Chairman,
Ladies and Gentlemen!

In 1964, the Republic of Estonia had been under the Soviet occupation power for 24 years. Lyndon B. Johnson was the President of the United States of America, Nikita Khruschev was the leader of the Soviet Union, Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home forfeited his post to Harold Wilson, Winston Churchill paid his last visit to the House of Commons on the eve of his 90th birthday, François Mauriac published his book ''De Gaulle'', and Jean-Paul Sartre published ''Les mots'', England sanctioned the production of oil and gas in the North Sea, the James Bond film ''Goldfinger'' was on in the cinemas, war was going on in Vietnam , and the Soviet Union won 41 gold medals on the Tokyo Olympic Games, coming first as always. I collected these facts from the book ''History Timetables'', bought in Washington this summer. This volume, weighing more than two kilos, starts with the first cities of Mesopotamia and ends with the retirement of Eduard Shevardnadze from the post of the foreign minister of the Soviet Union. Thus, the book covers 7,000 years, but Finland, in fact, is only mentioned once, in the year 1919, and Estonia not even once. Every nation and every generation is responsible for writing their own history, even today.

The year 1964 was important for Estonia for two reasons. In autumn, the Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung received a delegation of the Socialist Party of Japan in Beijing and informed them that China was not going to accept the Soviet hegemony over Estonia and all other Central European countries. This statement did not receive much attention in Estonia or among expatriate Estonians. It was considered to be a manifestation of deteriorating relations between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, which it certainly was. And yet, for three reasons, it is still worth noteworthy: first, the readiness of the People's Republic of China to discuss the restoration of Estonia's independence was expressed unequivocally and contained an ethical problem. Second, even after normal relations with the Soviet Union had been restored, the People's Republic of China closely followed the developments in Estonia and published information e.g. on the student unrests in Tartu. And third, although the People's Republic of China was the 21st to establish diplomatic relations with Estonia in 1991, it was the first among those countries who for the first time opened an Embassy in Tallinn.

Using completely different colours, I would like to describe President Kekkonen's visit to Estonia on the same spring, i.e. in March 1964. I have spoken of this many times, and therefore, I am going to read you my own text from Juhani Salokannel's book ''Sielunsilta'' (Bridge of Souls).

''The fact that Kekkonen returned from his state visit to Warsaw via Estonia was very significant for us. He played an elegant trick on the Soviet foreign ministry. Usually, the speeches of any visit have been agreed upon long beforehand. When Kekkonen spoke at the Assembly Hall of Tartu University, he spoke pure Estonian - to the delight of Estonians and to the horror of Russians.

None of the Soviet Estonian newspapers published his speech. I have the text of this speech, I know who translated it, but I have also seen Kekkonen's own corrections to the manuscript. All the corrections concern the paragraphs underlining the need to preserve Estonia, the Estonian culture, the Estonian language, the Estonian identity.

In politics, nothing is given gratis. Politics has always been an art of trade. In return for his words, Kekkonen had to pay with something that the Russians considered to be especially threatening - he had to terminate official Finland's contacts with the expatriate Estonian organisations in Sweden. And this was what Kekkonen did.

But only Kekkonen, and not, for instance, Pertti Virtaranta, who went to the funeral of Julius Mägiste in Stockholm and returned with Julius Mägiste's unpublished research papers; with him, we discussed at length which of those could be published in Finland.

To be brief: the price that Kekkonen paid was a price only for the Russians, it did not break the ties of the Finnish academic circles or the Finnish youth with the expatriate Estonians living in Sweden. As a result, a ferry started to operate between Tallinn and Helsinki. This was the bargain Kekkonen got from the Russians.

The Russians could not have imagined that tourist traffic between Estonia and Finland would become a social phenomenon unprecedented in the history of Europe. This was a one-way road, a very strange road.''

End quote.

Allow me to comment on the above from the viewpoint of an Estonian.

I do not know how many times the future President of Finland had visited Estonia before World War II. Helena Sepp, who was born in Finland, graduated from the Turku University and is now working at the Tartu University Museum, does not address this issue in her article ''The Finnish Patriot and Estonia''. I leave this question open, and limit myself to Kekkonen's visit to occupied Estonia.

Let me here also point out some facts that need to be repeated. First, President Kekkonen had been on an official visit to Poland, but his three-day sojourn in Estonia on his return from Warsaw was unofficial. Both Finnish and Soviet papers emphasised this. In other words, Finland abided by the resolution of democratic states not to recognise the occupation of Estonia on the basis of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

Second. At the Tallinn airfield, President Kekkonen thanked Alexei Müürisepp, Chairman of the Presidium of the Estonian SSR, for the invitation to visit Estonia. Alexei Müürisepp had delivered the invitation to President Kekkonen on the previous summer, when he had been allowed to visit Finland. The notion that the Estonian power elite - the nomenclature - had any right to invite a foreign Head of State to a visit bespeaks of a naïve misapprehension of the totalitarian system. Hence the question: why did the Kremlin consider it necessary to allow President Kekkonen to visit Estonia?

I can see three reasons: first, the Soviet Union had an obsessive fear that the expatriate Estonians in Sweden, the United States and Canada might extend their influence to Finland. Second, I sense President Kekkonen's political instinct to take advantage of the Kremlin's fear. And third, there was his interest towards Estonia that had been there since the days of his youth, and was well known to the Soviet side. Already on his first state visit to the Soviet Union in 1958, Kekkonen had requested the permission to visit Estonia, but instead of Estonia, he had been taken to Uzbekistan. In fact, he started to build the bridge to Estonia already after he had been elected President in spring 1956, by sending Academician Kustaa Vilkuna and Professor Väinö Kaukanen to the celebrations of the 70th birthday of Friedebert Tuglas. This modest and yet exceptional evening of tribute in the Big Studio of the Estonian Radio could be considered the bridgehead of Kekkonen's visit. ''For him, the closed ESSR was a challenge, not a law of nature,'' Helena Sepp wrote in the forthcoming second part of her article, and I share her opinion here.

Before leaving Estonia, President Kekkonen gave an interview to the Estonian Television, where he recommended the restoration of maritime traffic between Helsinki and Tallinn. I am convinced that the restoration of maritime traffic was indeed the price that the Soviet Union had naively offered for the discontinuation of relations with expatriate Estonians. The advice to restore the maritime traffic was reiterated by Kekkonen again in December the same year and in February the next year, and on July 7, 1965, we had reached the point when first the ''Vanemuine'', then the ''Tallinn'', and finally the ''Georg Ots'', a ship built in Poland, started to take Finns from Helsinki to Tallinn and back.

I could conclude my presentation here, if the restoration of maritime traffic between Estonia and Finland had been the sole purpose of the Finnish President's visit to Estonia. But President Kekkonen could see further than that. Two months after his visit to Estonia, he convened some Finnish Estophiles to his residence at Tamminiemi, and told them: ''If we wish to act so as to build good future prospects for Estonianness, we can see no other possibility than preserving contacts with the Estonians living in Estonia.''

I have tried to connect this simple sentence with statistics: in twenty-five years, more than three million Finns visited Estonia, half of them visited Estonia two times or more, and half of those again visited Estonia once a year, and half of them, more than once a year. This no longer was the iron curtain, and it was much more than tourism. Finnish books, magazines and newspapers spread in Tallinn, and the inhabitants of northern Estonia could follow the murder of Kennedy, the steps of Neil Armstrong, and the parliamentary elections in Finland on the Finnish TV. Estonia changed. Estonia did not become an open society, but it became less and less totalitarian. Estonia started to think, to ask herself questions, and to look for the answers in reality. And when we now, on the ninth year of our regained independence, have to answer the question why Estonia has proved so successful among the candidate states of the European Union, the answer, despite everything, is simple: ''Our co-operation has always proved to be mutually beneficial.''

These were the words of President Kekkonen, spoken in Tartu University, on March 12, 1964. They meant a lot in those hard times, and mean even more now when times are better.

President Kekkonen, Ladies and Gentlemen, is with us even today!

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